He investigates state senators and career police officials, following the money to discover who benefits from Detroit's decline. He embeds with a local fire brigade struggling to defend its neighborhood against systemic arson and bureaucratic corruption. With the steel-eyed reportage that has become his trademark - and the righteous indignation only a native son possesses - LeDuff sets out to uncover what destroyed his city. Detroit is where his mother's flower shop was firebombed where his sister lost herself to drugs where his brother works in a factory cleaning Chinese-manufactured screws so they can be repackaged as 'Made in America.' But all that is behind him now, after returning to find his hometown in total freefall. In another life, Charlie LeDuff won the Pulitzer Prize reporting for The New York Times. A city the size of San Francisco and Manhattan could neatly fit into Detroit's vacant lots. Once the vanguard of America's machine age - mass production, automobiles, and blue-collar jobs - Detroit is now America's capital for unemployment, illiteracy, foreclosure, and dropouts. Detroit, once the richest city in the nation, is now its poorest. In the heart of America, a metropolis is quietly destroying itself. An explosive exposé of Detroit, icon of America's lost prosperity, from Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist Charlie LeDuff

Detroit an american autopsy